This page discusses the concept of items in the game. For a list of items and their recipes, see List of Items and Recipes.

Some of the basic items are food which you can eat, buckets which you can fill and from which you can drink, wood which you can burn (but it takes less time to burn it if you are lucky enough to have matches or a lighter), rocks which act as walls that block off their current tile, and a knife or sharpened stick which you can use to fight predators.

Food

You need to eat and drink. Your hunger and thirst meters are ticking down, and when one of them empties you die. But, we don’t want the player to starve extremely quickly, that just sounds tedious. It should be quick enough that they feel a sense of urgency, but not so quick that they are constantly scrambling for their next meal.

Some types of food are:

1. Fish, which you can catch (maybe a more experienced player can use rocks to block in some fish to form a fish farm).
2. Coconuts that you can smash by dropping a rock on them
3. Cows?--harder to get because you must kill them with an axe or something more than a knife or sharp stick
4. Bugs. They are under logs, and they appear on your rotten food, if we let food rot.
5. Berries. But they given you little nourishment.
6. A garden to grow some food? This would be more long term. I.e., food would grow sometime around the second or third plane flyover. It would really be for people going for the super-secret ending where you survive for >4hrs, and need more food than is available on the island without growing your own.
7. Water comes from rivers. You start with a canteen or bucket or something.
8. Beer can be found in the crates (you were fishing after all). But don’t have too much or else you’ll get wrecked.

Some food is raw, and must be cooked by dropping it on a fire. A cooked version of the food appears next to the fire. Cooked food can be eaten, but it also spoils--maybe.

Equipment

Other equipment (things that wouldn’t naturally be on a deserted island) floats slowly to shore in crates from your sunken boat. You can open the crates to get at their contents (and you can probably burn the crates too). This will be things like: matches, a lighter, a knife, and my axe, a net, a signal mirror (increases chances of a plane spotting you), and more. The equipment that you start with and the things that float to shore depend on your starting character. You get a random subset of the things from their boat, so you don’t necessarily get the same things each game. Initially, you are a fisherman and have fishing equipment, but you can unlock others like a tourist, a marine, Bear Grylls, a movie star, the professor, and Mary Ann.

There should probably be a lot of miscellaneous items that serve no practical purpose except as, perhaps, fuel for the fire. It’s fun to have a bunch of different items in each game even if they don’t really do anything in particular. Alternatively, they can all do something and we have to come up with a lot of items along with what they do. Maybe a simple language to express the outcome of combining items, so it’s not hard coded.

Wilson can be a special item that seems to have no purpose, but if you raft off the island with him (taking up a wasted space on your raft, that otherwise would be used to hold precious food) then it’s some kind of achievement, as in FTL.

Attributes

Items have different weights, and moving a heavy item without a cart can take a long time and can make you thirsty more quickly. Some items, like matches, are rendered useless if they get wet--keep them away from water! Some items float, others do not. Food is either meat or plant. One special achievement is to win having eaten only plants.

Rafts and Carts

Typically you can only hold one item. If the item is too heavy then you move slowly and get more thirsty. You can find or make carts and rafts which help you move more items and heavier items by placing them on the squares of the cart or raft. Rafts let you move rocks or sinkable items out over water (so maybe you can drop rocks in the ocean to trap in some fish, but this needs a more experienced player that is trying for a longer game).

You can build a raft to escape the island, but it must be large enough. Small rafts sink after moving a certain distance through the water. You have to bring them back to shore before they sink. To get far enough away from the island you need a big raft that won’t sink and that has enough squares upon which you can put fresh (unsalty) water and food.